Reviewed February 2020 and rechecked Aug 2020.
Sadly there is no significant change here in the year since I last reviewed the data provision by councils. The big gain is that Renrewshire Council have launched a new data portal with over fifty datasets. Most councils have had little or no change. Sadly the Highland Council portal, procured as part of the Scottish Cities Alliance's Data Cluster programme, has vanished. I dont think it ever saw a dataset being added to it. Searching Highland Council's website for open data finds nothing. More than a third of councils (13 out of a total of 32) still make no open data provision.
Given the presence of COSLA on the Open Government Scotland steering group, this situation needs to be raised there.
A list of open data resources in the Scottish local government.
Data is broken into three types - using APIs, open data, and linked open data.
| Key | Definition |
|---|---|
| A | API |
| L | Linked Open Data |
| O | Open Data |
Data provided by the 32 Local Authorities. The data provision falls into three formats: portal, landing page and GIS-only data.
Change (+/-) in number of datasets published is measured since Feb 2019.
The following councils have open data portals - most, if not all, CKAN.
| Council | URL | Status | Datasets | +/- since 2019 | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aberdeen City Council | URL | 16 | +11 | O | |
| Angus Council | URL | 30 | -4 | O | |
| Clackmannanshire Council | URL | 17 | -1 | O | |
| Dumfries and Galloway | URL | 33 | 0 | 0 | |
| Dundee City Council | URL | 56 | +5 | O | |
| Edinburgh City Council | URL | 236 | +2 | O | |
| Glasgow City Council | URL | 95 | +6 | O | |
| North Ayrshire Council | URL | 126 | +21 | O | |
| Perth and Kinross Council | URL | 49 | +3 | O | |
| Stirling Council | URL | 13 | +5 | O |
Between checking in Feb 2020 and rechecking in Aug 2020, Dundee's number of datasets had shrunk by 8.
It is worth looking behind the numbers. For example Edinburgh has a health-looking 236 datasets available, which looks great. But the most recently updated one,
The following councils have open landing pages as part of their websites.
| Council | URL | Status | Datasets | Change | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aberdeenshire Council | URL | 28 | 0 | O | |
| East Ayrshire Council | URL | 4 | 0 | O | |
| East Renfrewshire Council | URL | 5 | 0 | O | |
| Moray Council | URL | 8 | 0 | O | |
| North Lanarkshire Council | URL | 22 | +5 | O | |
| Shetland Islands Council | URL | 1 | -3 | O | |
| South Ayrshire Council | URL | 11 | 0 | O |
These councils only expose geographical open data using their GIS systems.
| Council | URL | Status | Datasets | Change | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Argyll and Bute Council | URL | 33 | +2 | O | |
| Renfrewshire Council | URL | 54 | +54 | O |
The following authorities still have no open data provision that I can find.
- East Dunbartonshire Council
- East Lothian Council
- Falkirk Council
- Fife Council
- Highland Council
- Inverclyde Council (*)
- Midlothian Council
- Orkney Islands Council
- Scottish Borders Council
- South Lanarkshire Council
- West Dunbartonshire Council
- Western Isles Council (Comhairle nan Eilean Siar)
- West Lothian Council
(*) Despite Inverclyde publishing an update in March 2019 (Page 3 of Appendix 1) saying that its implementation of an Open Data strategy is 'Complete' I could find no open data anywhere.
The lack of open data is a major obstacle to innovation and gets in the way of social and economic benefits that OD should deliver. Without well formatted and licenced open data it is necessary to scrape content from websites. This can only be done when the website owners allow it through clear terms of use and licensing. While the Scottish Government permit content re-use, 30 of 32 local authorities do not. I've have updated a survey of the use of OGL licensing by Scottish Local Authorities. It also shows a lack of adherence to ROPSI legislation too.
Where common standards exist - such as the 360 Giving standard for the publication of support for charities - organisations should be universally adopting these. Yet this is only used by two of 32 authorities, all of whom have grant-making services. Surely, during a pandemic especially, it would be advantageous to funders and recipients to know who is funding which body to deliver what project?
If you spot an error - or missing data - please fork this repo and submit a pull request, as four others have kindly done!
Alternatively email me at ian@codethecity.org with an update.
Back to the main 2020 review.